1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information list generation apparatus for listing on a terminal equipment the information such as an article posted to a message board, received electronic mail, etc., and more specifically to an information list generation apparatus for displaying important information in a visible and higher priority position in the listing regardless of newer or older records.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the information communications network technology has made remarkable progress. It can be, for example, a message board function for enabling a plurality of users to browse information on an electronic message board presented on a Web page through a network such as Internet, etc. as a system of groupware often used in a LAN (local area network). As for groupware, with the current spread of the WWW, all or a part of the functions of most products can be used through a Web browser. Normally, on these message boards, each user can record information (hereinafter referred to as an article).
An article recorded latest is assigned the highest priority, and each article is listed according to the assigned priority. Normally, the priorities are set in order from the highest portion on the listing. Therefore, the last recorded article is set as the highest order article according to the above mentioned priority setting method, and listed on top of the listing.
FIG. 1 shows an example of the listing of articles on the message board of the conventional groupware system. In FIG. 1, a display 2 of the groupware is shown on a display screen 1 by the Web browser. The display 2 includes four types of information listings, that is, a message article list 3 of a message board, a comment information list 4 of an electronic conference room, a recorded document list 5 for document management, and a message collection list 6 of an information collection. These listings are displayed with a remark ‘in order from the newest information’ enclosed by parentheses. That is, the information is displayed in order from the latest recording date.
In the message article list 3 of the message board, the message from Ms. Yamashita as titled ‘education is available’, dated May 18 14:35 is displayed on top, followed by the message from Mr. Suzuki as titled ‘the faulty server’, dated May 15 10:11, followed by the message again from Mr. Suzuki as titled ‘the shared printer has been repaired’, dated May 14 16:49, followed by the message from Mr. Fujita as titled ‘holding a closing party’, dated May 12 13:37, and finally followed by the message from Mr. Suzuki as titled ‘a countermeasure against virus’, dated May 10 12:34.
On the listings of the above mentioned example, a predetermined number (five articles in this example) of articles are displayed after being extracted from all recorded articles in order from the latest recording date. Thus, with the conventional message board, when an article is newly recorded in the database, the listing data is generated from the recorded information about the database containing the newly recorded article. Therefore, the article recorded previously and shown on the listing is sequentially lowered in priority, thereby displaying the predetermined number of newer articles in order from the highest priority as an updated result. The number of listed articles in all articles is predetermined (five articles in this example) by a display instruction.
Thus, in the conventional message board technology, a newly recorded article lowers the display priority of the currently recorded articles. As a result, the article whose updated priority is lower than the predetermined number cannot be displayed on the listing any more although it is important information.
Furthermore, although important articles are listed, a newly recorded article is assigned a higher priority regardless of the importance level. Therefore, a less important article can be frequently displayed in a higher position in priority than a more important article, thereby causing the more important article to be preceded and invisible by other less important articles.